By Gordon Dritschilo
RUTLAND HERALD
Police officers don’t frequently find themselves rowing after suspects, but Vermont State Police Academy Executive Director Heather Simons said they almost never have to run a mile-and-a-half at a time either.
As the state tries to figure out how to hire more police officers, the Vermont State Police Academy is changing how it evaluates potential officers. Law enforcement leaders say they are not lowering the standards, but trying to identify “the best standards,” and toward that end the academy has changed the physical entrance exam and is rewriting the written entrance exam.
The written exam has been suspended as a requirement while a subcommittee from Vermont Criminal Justice Council works to create a new one. Simons said the academy’s new exam will be “inclusive” and address different learning styles.
“That’s 21st-century policing,” she said. “There’s a rate of transformation right now in law enforcement that’s pretty aggressive. Anyone that’s willing to take this on, we’re very grateful. … We want to reflect the demographic that we’re protecting and serving and all applications are welcome.”
The new physical test, however, is already in place. While recruits once needed to perform a 1.5-mile run in a time determined by age and gender, they now have to deliver a similarly graded performance on a rowing machine. Simons said the change was made in part because the new test was less likely to injure the people taking it.
“We need to be conscious around injury at the academy,” she said. “I think in any profession, there are common injuries people can get training.”
Beyond that, she said it was a better gauge of the overall fitness of a candidate and their ability to perform the physical tasks required of police officers.
“That might be to physically intervene, it might be to carry someone, it might be to save a life,” she said. “Carrying somebody, that’s relevant. Standing for a long time, that’s relevant. … It’s a way to measure strength and stamina at the same time.”
Simons also said recruits will still be doing plenty of running and other physical training during their time at the academy — just not as part of the entrance exam.
Burlington Police Chief John Murad, who serves as chair of the committee choosing the new entrance test, said they set out to review the old test due to concerns about “disparate outcomes,” particularly for non-native English speakers. He said they had a hard time even getting to look at the old test to review it due to fears questions might somehow leak to candidates.
When they finally did get to review the test, he said they were surprised at what they found.
“There were questions on it not relevant to policing,” he said. “It had a temperature conversion that had to be done mathematically.”
Murad said police officers need a certain level of math skill — analyzing crash scenes was an example — but that the test wasn’t looking at the type of math they would need. He said some questions even the veteran police officers on the council did not think they could answer and others seemed too subjective to be answered fairly.
So, Murad said, the council voted to scrap the test. A review of the psychological test for academy entrants is also pending.
“There is some pushback, but from my perspective, you don’t catch flak unless you’re over the target,” he said. “We are over the target of changing an institution that can be very cautious about change.”
Murad said the council has issued a request for proposals for companies interested in writing a new test and there were “quite a few” such vendors.
“Some of them build products for any number of different testing standards,” he said. “They can build a test for, does the person have academic acumen? Are they going to be good at problem-solving? We can rate job performance predictions for control of conflict or report writing.”
In the face of all those options, Murad also said it was important to remember that the test is not to determine whether the candidates will make good police officers so much as whether they can handle the course of training at the academy.
“There are only so many seats and beds,” he said. “There are only so many sessions a year and every agency wants to put people there. … The full ability to assess whether someone is going to be a good police officer is never going to be in a single test.”
Figuring out what sort of officers they will be, he said, is up to the agencies looking at hiring them and the field training done at those agencies after the academy.
“If you do not build on what was done in the academy and give officers support and additional training … you are doing the officers a disservice,” Murad said.
The academy will only be able to admit a wider pool of applicants if it gets one, and law enforcement leaders say they are still having trouble finding people who want to be police officers. Murad said his department is staffed 20% of its current funding and 40% below historical norms. The Rutland Police Department is a third short of its department and positions were cut from next year’s budget because Mayor David Allaire said there is no reason to believe they will all be filled. Rutland also just approved $10,000 retention bonuses for the officers it does have.
A survey by the Vermont Department of Public Service last year found a widening gap statewide between officers leaving law enforcement and new ones being certified. Law enforcement leaders say they are having trouble getting the state’s attention about the problem.
A search of the Vermont Legislature’s website this week turned up no pending bills looking at police officer recruitment or retention. An inquiry to the House Judiciary Committee, which deals with a variety of law enforcement matters, drew a response from Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, the committee chair, saying the House Committee on Government Operations was “working more closely on the issue.” Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford, the chair of that committee, said it had not really come up there, either.
“The last iteration of the worker relocation program, there were specific targeted occupations the state was looking to attract — health care workers, day care workers, and I believe even retail,” he said. “The Legislature chose not to include law enforcement as a targeted occupation. … Whenever I run into a local legislator, I take an opportunity to express frustration with that. At a minimum, we would certainly ask to be part of that, or at least include law enforcement officers to be eligible for that. There’s been no appetite for it.”
The Barre City Police Department, on the other hand, only has two vacancies out of 21 positions, but Chief Braeden Vail said he’s not sure if there’s anything the department is doing differently that other departments might benefit from imitating.
“I’m new here, and I’m very grateful we are at the level we are and not in as bad shape as others,” he said. “There’s a lot that goes into the issues depending on where you are.”
He said some of the issues are “generational” and that Vermont police officers struggling with “being judged locally” for national trends in law enforcement. He also said a location can figure into police recruitment just like it can for any other job.
“I think as a state, as a whole, we have to think about doing things differently,” he said.
gordon.dritschilo @rutlandherald.com
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